The numbers show that among the 240 fans who watched only the on-air version of the show, about half said Pepsi promotes music events and supports music artists, while less than 30 percent said the brand was in touch with youth culture. About 15 percent of the TV-only watchers consider Pepsi "cool" or "hip" while about 1 percent indicated that Pepsi exposed them to the latest trends, styles and fashion.

But those numbers skyrocket among fans who watch the TV show, go online and enter The Hills virtual world. Upwards of 90 percent of those viewers said Pepsi promotes music and recording artists, while almost 70 percent considered the brand to be both in touch with youth culture and cool or hip.

And Pepsi's products were a hit with participating consumers in MTV's virtual world. The soft drink was the top-selling product in 2007, moving more than 110,000 cans that were virtually recycled and used more than 650,000 times. The cans were also seen in use over 2.4 million times by 85 percent of the user base, according to the study. "Those are very high numbers," said Pepsi's Vail. "To have people in-world using their virtual MTV bucks to buy Pepsi at those rates was amazing to us."

Based on this early success, the study will be expanded to include other MTV franchises and possibly other co-owned networks as well, said Colleen Fahey Rush, evp research, MTV Networks.

According to Rush, a key finding from the study is that "multiplatform engagement is oversimplified. We tend to clump online into a single platform, and what we learned from the study is that there are so many ways to engage online now."

The study showed that there are different groups of fans with what she described as "predictable" behavior. So-called "seekers," comprising about 54 percent of those tracked in the study, look for as much added content as they can by going online to search for past episodes, cast bios and pictures and to read blogs and forums.

Rush defines a more proactive group of viewers as "generators," or super fans who talk about the show in person and by instant messaging and texting. They don't just read blogs about the show, they write them and create avatars for the virtual world. About one-third of those tracked in the survey fell into this category, Rush said.

It's that sort of segmentation among different online user bases that intrigued outside researchers who have seen the study, including Joel Rubinson, chief research officer, the Advertising Research Foundation. "Differentiating between the seekers and the generators struck me as a significant," said Rubinson. "What's groundbreaking here is they were able to link engagement to an experiential environment that goes way beyond the core of the business. If they didn't offer the generators the ability to publish their own comments, you'd be losing this ability to reinforce the relationship that people feel with the show and the fact that they're enjoying themselves."

Henry Jenkins. director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program, who has also seen the study agreed. "Engagement is the term we use to refer not to just regular TV viewership but to a more passion-driven and more socially driven mode of watching television and connecting pieces together," he said.